GDC 08: Entertainment content convergence in online worlds
Filed under: Business models, Culture, Events, real-world, MMO industry, Club Penguin, Second Life, Webkinz, Virtual worlds, Massively Event Coverage, Gaia Online
We spent most of Monday ensconced in the GDC Worlds in Motion summit track, which made "standing room only" seem extremely spacious -- most of the sessions were packed to the gills and then some. It seems like more than a few industry types are interested in the intersections between gaming and virtual worlds. Case in point, the following session we've paraphrased (hopefully not too liberally!) from Reuben Steiger, CEO of Milllions of Us, a company that builds marketing campaigns and content for virtual worlds.
Reuben: Storytelling is the bedrock of human culture. (Looking at a slide with a real campfire on the left and a user-created campfire in Second Life on the right) -- users in virtual worlds are recreating this storytelling tradition. I'm going to make a contention: the internet has failed as a storytelling medium. Instead, the norm is bathroom humor and ridiculous jokes.
So virtual worlds: are they games or not? What defines a game -- linguists and semioticians get real worked up about it. The audience might say "virtual worlds are games without rules, competition, goals or fun." And it's hard to blame them. Extreme openness has defined virtual worlds, where fun can be in a way you define as opposed to what some game developer feels is fun. But the appeal of virtual worlds is that we can tell stories on a broader and less walled playing field.
I was inspired to start this company by ARGs. These are things where people get really involved. The kids' market is also a huge thing -- operators on a large scale are making money where other markets aren't. Transactional figures for virtual merchandise are really interesting.
Between 60-100 million people globally are participating in virtual worlds. Second Life has received 95% of the media attention so far but it's really only 1 to 1.5% of the overall market.
The lines between different forms of entertainment are beginning to blur. Telling an anecdote about grandpa's entertainment: back then even 5 cents for a film was too expensive so he and his three brothers would rotate actually going to see the movie, then come home and relay the story to the other two. That was social media. As tech progressed we got less social and more fragmented, which is depressing. Look at civic architecture then versus now and you see the same trend -- how we play affects how we live and work.
At one time movies were the big entertainment, and this eventually led to gaming because of ancillary revenue streams. It turned out that people who paid for movies were willing to buy other things related to the movies they loved. Eventually gaming became one of those ancillary streams. Now we see things like Club Penguin starting to invert that model. Disney bought Club Penguin for $700 million dollars -- and now you can imagine them wanting to make a film based on the game, as opposed to the other way around where games came out of film.
We should also look at the lessons of Webkinz. Four years ago I announced to my family and friends that I was going to work for this wacky online company called Second Life and no one had any idea what it was about then. This year, everyone gifted my kids with Webkinz toys. The social experience of your toy is extended on the web in this model. The company has enhanced the value of their physical object by tying it to a virtual world.
A Millions of Us case study: Gossip Girl in Second Life, a project to tie the Gossip Girl television show to a campaign in in Second Life. Users would interface with in-game "mobile devices" that tied them into the game, where they would spread gossip in exchange for points which could be used at the Gossip Girl in-world clothing store. At its peak there were 150,000 teens accessing it per day.
Another case study: The World Wrestling Entertainment's Summer Slam campaign we ran in Gaia Online, a virtual world with 9 million users and over 1 billion forum posts. We created custom avatars and a narrative event in the forums over a 5-day campaign that essentially took over the site. Users got really involved, special WWE-themed items became really valuable to show your support for one of two opposing wrestlers.
Another case study: a promo for the Fox TV show the Sarah Connor Chronicles. We created a fictional company, Enitechlabs.com, and made an ARG out of some of the "science" of the show.
What will we see in the year ahead?
- 1. Social networks will become "avatarized"
- 2. Virtual worlds will become more like social networks
- 3. Television tie-ins with virtual worlds will increase
- 4. Virtual worlds will hit the console (Sony Home, e.g.)
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-19-2008 @ 9:25AM
Erik Sagen said...
I can see that it's been successful for companies to tie together a virtual world with a tangible object, but it still makes me a bit uneasy. Case in point; Webkinz, as he describes above, is quite the phenomenon this year (it's the Beanie Babies of 90s), but I hadn't heard of it and I have two little ones.
We were gifted two of them - an elephant and a pig. My son, who just turned two, could care less about the virtual world for his elephant but my daughter loved it for about 10 minutes. She was able to adopt her pig, name her and then proceed to play some games with her pig avatar.
It left me uneasy because while some of this was free, there was some monetization scheming going on for "premium" features and really, for my 4-year-old she wasn't interested. I can imagine there's a market for this, but it's not something I'll ever fully understand or accept I suppose - not for kids.
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2-19-2008 @ 9:28AM
Ryan said...
Saying, "The internet has failed as a story-telling medium" is inaccurate. It is more appropriate to recognize that its worth as a story-telling medium did not immediately become apparent to everyone. But saying, "it can't be done" is less valuable than saying, "it hasn't been done yet."
When cinema was first gaining popularity a hundred years ago, the nay-sayers insisted that cinema would never be able to tell meaningful stories because it was used primarily for slap-stick trip-on-banana-peel gags. It needed its own grammar.
The same goes for the internet. Interactive fiction is nascent -- but those of us who are working in this field are pioneers. Until wallets unlock on the telling of second-person stories, we're forced to stay indie or pander to the "I want more explosions" crowd.
Ryan FitzGerald
Nihilonaut Productions
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2-19-2008 @ 11:18AM
Angel said...
There are some of us out here in non-game developing, sociological, and psychology oriented academia attempting to isolate and understand current methods of story telling used in virtual worlds as well as developing methods of more engaging and real story telling. Many people in the industry have a tendency to turn their noses up and non-quantifying research (meaning research that does not produce favoring numbers in involvement). True, there are only a handful of us but we are passionate about or work and we want to help.
The real trick is we need all or the development studios out there to let us in your door with out having to “server time” for 10 to 20 years and “earn our due” so you all will listen to us. Some of us are not exactly young and do not have the time to go through that process. The younger people who really know what they are talking about are not going for the entry level jobs because they feel the development industry does not want to listen to them so they become more deeply involved in the academy because that is the only job sector that will pay them for what they do and respect their work.
If you all want to really break out of the “more explosions” method of development you need to reconfigure your hiring practices and let us in at a place where we can immediately help. I can answer some of the currently unanswerable questions (questions that are largely unanswerable because you do not know that they need to be asked) about story telling, you only need to give me and others like me the chance. Begin making a place for academics who are trained to analyze rather than those who are trained to sit at a terminal and you will see what we can do for you.
For decades now we have faced the offhanded gesture from academia embodied in the statement “they are JUST games”. Like wise we have received the cold shoulder from the industry embodied in the phrase “they are JUST academics”... at least the academy is starting to listen but for that conversation to continue the development community MUST begin to listen also. The university system is mired in capitalistic functionality, “the University as a business”. It is like any other business that is enslaved in supply-and-demand. Demand for individuals like myself will valorize our work which can only then server to improve your product...
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2-20-2008 @ 8:02AM
TigroSpottystripes Katsu said...
well techinicly, most virtual worlds are actually IN the internet, I guess he is actually talking about the web (one of the Ws in "www")
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2-26-2008 @ 5:12AM
Tateru Nino said...
It drives me crazy when people get the Web mixed up with the Internet. It isn't hard to see why, though. The Web is one of the latest shiny pieces, and it's a bit that people actually *see*. The larger bulk of the Internet is largely opaque to them.
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